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    Analyzing and Aligning German Compound Nouns

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    In this paper, we present and evaluate an approach for the compositional alignment of compound nouns using comparable corpora from technical domains. The task of term alignment consists in relating a source language term to its translation in a list of target language terms with the help of a bilingual dictionary. Compound splitting allows to transform a compound into a sequence of components which can be translated separately and then related to multi-word target language terms. We present and evaluate a method for compound splitting, and compare two strategies for term alignment (bag-of-word vs. pattern-based). The simple word-based approach leads to a considerable amount of erroneous alignments, whereas the pattern-based approach reaches a decent precision. We also assess the reasons for alignment failures: in the comparable corpora used for our experiments, a substantial number of terms has no translation in the target language data; furthermore, the non-isomorphic structures of source and target language terms cause alignment failures in many cases
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